A Yorkshire terrier snatched from the arms of its 13-year-old owner in Hawthorne remains missing four days after the theft.

“It’s an awful thing for an adult to do that to a child,” said the girl’s mother, Nelda Hayes. “Thank God it wasn’t her or one of her friends” who was taken.

Hayes’ daughter was walking home with two friends about 3:30 p.m. Friday in the 4200 block of 116th Street when they were approached by a woman who asked to see the dog, named Lil-Man.

The family told authorities the dog is worth $3,500.

The three girls turned and walked the other way, but the woman followed, police said. The girls told investigators they noticed a 2007 black Dodge Charger with tinted windows and chrome rims parked next to them. The car’s occupants seemed to be watching and waiting.

The woman suddenly grabbed the small dog out of the girl’s arms, held him up to the window and yelled “Look, aunt,” then handed the dog to someone in the car.

The Charger then sped north on Oxford Avenue from 116th Street, according to police. The woman ran down the street in the same direction.

The 13-year-old owner called her grandmother on her cell phone for help.

The teenager was “pretty traumatized,” said Hawthorne police Lt. Michael Ishii. “For this to happen right before the holidays is pretty awful.”

“It was very scary,” Hayes said. “It was just terrible.”

Hayes said the family misses the dog, which they found two years ago on Christmas Day wandering in the street. They tried to find the owner, to no avail, she said.

Ishii said it is uncommon for dogs to be stolen right from an owner’s arms; pet thieves usually take dogs from backyards.

However, recently there have been a string of pet thefts in the Los Angeles area, including an incident last month at a La Mirada pet store. More than two dozen Yorkshire puppies worth $30,000 were stuffed into plastic bags after thieves broke into the Puppy Love pet store.

A few weeks following that incident, sheriff’s deputies arrested Walter Franklin Steward, 45, after tracking his license plate from a surveillance video.

Hawthorne police say this is the first local incident of this kind, and the attack was much more brazen than anything they have seen.

“If anybody has any information, we’d like to hear from them,” Ishii said.

The woman who snatched the dog is described as a black female in her mid-30s, about 5-foot-5, 180 pounds with braided hair. She also had a gap in the middle of her front teeth and had several chipped teeth, the girls told police.

The girls couldn’t describe the people inside the Charger because it had tinted windows, but they said they saw at least two black male adults and one black female inside the car.

Melissa Evans is the city editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Prior to joining the Long Beach paper in 2011, she was a reporter covering health care, religion, city government and social issues for newspapers in the Los Angeles area, the Bay Area and the East Coast. She has a master's degree in theology from Loyola Marymount University, a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Diego State, and has completed several fellowships in journalism. She has lived in the Long Beach area since 2007.